MARIO LOPRETE

MARIO LOPRETE

The Italian artist 

opens his views 



He lives only nine hours from New York, the duration of the flight that will take him from his city to NYC, the ‘Eldorado’. He thinks that The Big Apple is the right meeting point for all professionals in the art world.


He lives in Catanzaro, a small Calabrian city in South Italy. ‘It’s a beautiful place to live in.’ 


Geographically it is a dream place, but the same cannot be said about art. It is the place that the ancient Greeks called ‘Magna Grecia’, rich of culture and history, but with a bad political administration and sterile and incompetent ruling class that never wanted to take advantage of their exciting potential. 



‘At night I go to sleep and I feel satisfied 

because I think that another day has 

passed, a day dedicated to the research 

of the strength in my work'




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MEETING

Mario Loprete


To be honest, in the last years, something has changed, because some forward-looking entrepreneurs have understood the importance of the valorization of what history has given to us. 


In my city there are talented artists: some of them receive the right acknowledgment, some will have it in the future, but all of them plod, they inevitably suffer from the total absence of selling. That is because Catanzaro is greedy with its sons. 


The collectors from Catanzaro buy a lot of contemporary art. They attend art shows and national galleries, but the artists that get supported by their shopping are not from Calabria. 


The collectors from Catanzaro have an awful conception of the local artists and prefer to invest elsewhere. This is, unfortunately, the tragic scene in which I always lived in and it urged me right from the start to show my work somewhere else, where it gets judged for merit or demerit and not because it’s made by a ‘local artist’’. 


The Italian art system is doped with false auctions that make prices of unworthy artists rise and break the wings and the dreams of those whose art is like a second and but who live in total economic discomfort. 


Confronted this reality, the artists have only two possibilities: they can adjust to what the market and the artistic operators ask for, perverting their own way of making art, or they commit to find work that will make them economically emancipated, and free to continue to take forward their personal art project. 


Artistically, I formed myself as self-taught, studying the history of art and the great Master of art, aseptically, without external contaminations. I worked in an art shop of a Calabrian Master for six years, from whom I learnt a lot. Then in 2002, I strayed into Calabria to paint from the real, with the main goal of spee-ding up my hand and achieving technique, fighting against time, which changes light and colours. Then I became aware that I was missing something inside, I felt a void-like sensation. So at the age of 34 I decided to attend The Academy of Fine Arts of Catanzaro, aware that if I wanted to give more depth to my work I needed to confront myself with other artists, to share experiences and to search new goals. 


In February 2007, I finished my studies and now felt enriched and very motivated. I think that formation is necessary for every profession, but in art it is even more important. Ten people that study to become surgeons, when they finish their studies, they will be better in their profession by the measure of how close they get to the achievements of the best of them. 


Art is different. You need ‘to know what you know and what you do not know,’ that is true knowledge. An artist needs to be unique and know the history of art and who preceded him/her. 


The desire to do is incredible. I get up in the morning and I want to paint. At night I go to sleep and I feel satisfied because I think that another day has passed, a day dedicated to the research of the strength in my work. I never wished to be a painter of the fashion, of the moment. I strain myself to dwell on the pictorial quality of content. 


My art is always dedicated to those who recognize it. To those who can see a message. To those who see my message. Art is bought for passion, for pleasure, to invest. I like to think that whoever buys my works, also buys a temporal door, and those who want to enter it will be conducted into my world, into my way of doing art. It is not the man that chooses to be an artist, but it is the art that owns the person. 


When I find myself on the road, my brain automatically traces the prospective of what I see. I mix the colours on a virtual palette, searching for the right shades. As soon as the painting takes form in me, the landscape has already changed, and I start yet again. This is what makes a man an artist. 


I live in a world that I shape to my liking, throughout a virtual pictorial and sculptural movement, transferring my experiences, photographing reality throughout my filters, refined from years of research and experimentation. 


Painting for me is my first love. An important, pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the spasmodic research of a concept with which I want to create a message, this is the base of my painting. The sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal to the painting. That voluptuous and sensual lover that gives me different emotions, that touches prohibited chords… 


Alternating picture and sculpture, always searching to send my message, makes me a complete artist. 

Why Hip-Hop? At some point in my career, I felt the need to use a theme that could be understood by everyone. In Hip-Hop I found the solution. It is a philosophy of life, without geographical borders. Rap music always accompanied me in my study. It was the soundtrack of my work. 


Music is art and it is a part of my work. I prepared a beautiful series for an imminent art show composed of musical CDs, covered in concrete, on which are painted some B-Boys who are dancing. These are contained in their casing of plexiglas. Nowadays the musical lector could never play the music of a CD, but the music on the inside is there and it will always be there. Looking at an egg you already know that there is a yolk in there, without the need to open it. 


The subjects of my portraits take form from a picture that I take or that I download from the net. I elaborate them on the PC, and I cut what I consider to be superfluous, creating that important equilibrium with impressions that the subject must make. I have a database of five thousand different photos per artist, a photographic cut, social theme, projects for future art shows, etc. 


I like to portray Ja Rule, Xzibit, The Game, Mary J Blige, Beyonce and 50 Cent along with the Italian Hip-Hop scenario, closer to me. But I like painting people even more; they are way more real, living lives away from the photography sets, free from authors. These are the subjects that I find more emotional. 


I love to paint everything that symbolizes Urban Style, because I think that the task of the artist is to portray the world that surrounds them. 


About 10 years ago, I felt that my work needed a promotional push. Visiting cities like Milan, Basel, Rome, I stumbled upon some advertising signs as big as palaces that had promotional messages. So, I asked myself: Why don’t I paint real and recognizable metropolitan views, substituting the advertisements with my B-boys? 


The result had a lot of success; I insinuated doubt into the truthfulness of the sign or into the fact that I had managed to paint that painting in such dimensions? 


The new series of works on concrete is the project that is giving me even more personal and professional satisfaction. How was it born? It was the result of an important investigation of my work, the research of that ‘void’ that I felt was missing. Looking at my work in the past ten years, I understood that the semantics and semiotics were in my visual speech, but the right support to valorize the message was not there. 


Reinforced concrete, was created two thousand years ago by the Romans. It has a millenary story, made of amphitheatres, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now it is a synonym of modernity. Everywhere you go you find a concrete wall, there is the modern human in there. 


From Sidney to Vancouver, from Oslo to Pretoria, reinforced cement is present and so the support where the ‘writers’ can express themselves is present. 


The successive passage was obvious to me. If man brought art on the streets to make it accessible to everyone, why not bring the urban into galleries and museums? It was the winning step to the continuous evolutionary process of my work in that ‘void’ that I talked about before and that is what is driving me to exhibit in prestigious places and is leading important collectors to request my work. 


The artistic process in which I create my works is a classical one. After I have traced the incredibly detailed drawing, I apply the oil colours and the glazes and I achieve the result. 

When the painting has completely dried off, I brush it with a sealant that not only manages to unite every colour and shade, but it also gives to the artwork the shininess and lucidity that the posters – that each and every one of us had hanging on our wall – have. 



For my Concrete Sculptures I use my personal clothing. Throughout some artistic process, in which I use plaster, resin and cement, I transform them into artworks to hang. My memory, my DNA, my memories stay concreted inside, transforming the person that looks at the artworks into a type of post-modern archaeologist who studies my work as if they were urban artefacts. I love graffiti, I really like to study their communicative methods. 


I know absolutely nothing about how to do graffiti – I’ve tried, but with awful results. But with that experience I understood that the use of the word is fundamental to making art. Words arrive to the brain directly, like a cold and devastating bullet. 


In my series Words I use reinforced cement in all its essence and elegance. 


I build letters in reinforced cement, with which I compose the words that I use to send my message. They reach the viewer like a scratch, but they are in line with my work and my research. The abstract concept of the word presents itself, materializing with the concrete.

‘At night I go to sleep and I feel satisfied 

because I think that another day has 

passed, a day dedicated to the research 

of the strength in my work’ 

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